


evolution, in a sense

by WeAreTomorrow



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Backstory, Dark, M/M, Will's Past
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-23
Updated: 2013-04-23
Packaged: 2017-12-09 06:26:29
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 898
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/771070
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/WeAreTomorrow/pseuds/WeAreTomorrow
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This is Will at six:</p>
            </blockquote>





	evolution, in a sense

**This is Will at six:**

He knows the old man across the street is keeping a girl in his basement like a pet, like the dog his parents got for his birthday just like he knows the old man sleeps in bed with the girl, but not the way his dog curls up with him during a thunderstorm and not like his mom curls up with the neighbor when his dad is out late and it feels funny (wrong).

It feels hot-sharp, like burning his mouth on hot chocolate.

The old man is arrested and his parents go silent for a long time when they hear the news and his dad doesn’t drive by the house on his way home from work anymore.

**This is Will at ten:**

He likes to wander in the woods behind his house with his dog, still his first dog (in three weeks this one will get a bladder infection and be put to sleep; it will destroy him) because he doesn’t have anything more than acquaintances. The people his age are discovering each other, but people scare him, or are boring.

He finds cigarette buds and shallow graves full of small animals with their eyes gouged out and their mouths fused shut. Sometimes they’re still alive, breathing heavily through bashed noses; he learns to just walk away, they are past saving.

**This is Will at thirteen:**

Everybody in his grade watches cop shows.

He can always guess who the murderer is. Always.

**This is Will at sixteen:**

People his age are still discovering each other, surprised at every inevitable break-up, every positive pregnancy test despite the biology lessons; that class teaches him that all humans are 99.9 % identical and this is unsurprising, he is surrounded by the same prototype. He sits alone at lunch and this is fine, this is the way he wants it, this is a break from the constant crashing of hormones (hate/fear/jealously/desire-desire-desire) against his defensive walls.

A girl commits suicide and everybody mourns, such a waste, such a waste, if only we had known, and they forget that she had been running out of potential energy for years, worn down from the effort of smiling at people who didn’t smile back.

He knows about the tallymarks she cuts on the inside of her thighs, countdown until she made it to mid-thigh. She doesn’t have skirts long enough to lie in, so she killed herself.

**This is Will at eighteen:**

A teacher raped a girl at school, she doesn’t say anything. A mother runs over her son’s cat, she buries it in the yard and tells the boy it ran away. The gay kid down the block is bullied at school to the point of torture and transfers and transfers and transfers. The father that moves into the house where the old man used to live doesn’t chain his kids to the floor but he beats his wife when he comes home drunk from the unemployment office.

This is life and he doesn’t know what to do.

**This is Will at twenty-two:**

College is like high school except that the people are drunk more and the classes are interesting. He always sits in the front row and he’ll even talk to people about the lessons, on a good day. There are people like him (there is nobody like him) who won’t hold eye contact and can’t stop shaking and avoid social situations at high costs but they all have labels and none of them really fit. They give him one anyway but he doesn’t complain.

Three girls go missing at the same frat house. Then five. At six he takes his favorite professor aside and tells him about the way they bleed the girls out in a cult ritual, a perverted version of a fertility ritual.

His professor never looks at him the same, but the number stays at six and he understands his life has changed fundamentally (he knows what to do now).

**This is Will at twenty-eight:**

He is not accepted into the FBI.

That winter season, a serial killer launches a campaign in Seattle, Washington. The killer nails his victims to a cross and rapes them till they bleed out, men and women. The youngest is seventeen, the oldest is thirty-five. He could’ve figured it out in week (less, if they trusted his judgment); the good guys catch the killer two days after Christmas.

They didn’t ask him and he didn’t watch the news. There were eight victims.

**This is Will at thirty:**

He is a FBI Special Agent. This is a label and it doesn’t fit him but he likes it, so he doesn’t complain. It’s harder than he thought it would be, the hero-fantasy that refuses to die, crushed again.

He gives them the motive (it’s always, hate/fear/jealously/desire-desire-desire) but he’s still not the good guy when he catches the killer.

People persist in discovering each other, he’s found. But they shy away from the edges of his formula, scared of his end results. That’s reasonable; he has soaked up the worst of a humanity that prefers to ignore their nature and when squeezed, it’s impossible to forget some people are predators. He doesn’t know what he is—predator or prey (pick: all of the above).

 _Pure empathy_ , says Hannibal, through sharp teeth.

This is not a label.


End file.
